Now we’ve had a chance to actually try out Vainglory in real-world settings: on my apartment’s decent Wi-Fi setup and on an actual iPhone 6 Plus. As it turns out, the game is almost entirely successful at transferring to the the smaller form factor, with only a few minor gripes that can be addressed in future updates. Read More

Here’s a positive story about tech companies and their awareness of the outside world, just in case this week had you disillusioned. Evernote today issued a fix for its Penultimate digital handwriting app for the iPad that it hopes will end more than a week of frustration for its users. Read More

Monument Valley is arguably the best mobile game of 2014, and now there’s more of it to love: Developer Ustwo has let loose Forgotten Shores, the $1.99 in-app purchase that unlocks eight all-new levels. If you’ve played the game, then you’ll welcome the opportunity to jump back into the strange land of isometric perspective, a wandering princess, lovely soft color palettes… Read More

Monument Valley is a mobile game that’s unlike any other mobile game out there – a puzzler that has a minimal but surprisingly deep storyline, simple but engaging and rich gameplay, and characters that are easy to feel for despite the fact that you know almost nothing about them.
The game’s biggest failing, if it had one, was that it was painfully brief. The brevity… Read More

Google has updated Maps to keep with the visual theme introduced with Android 5.0 Lollipop, which it calls material design. The new mobile apps now feature bold headers of solid flat colors and animations that evoke pieces of paper sliding over one another. The apps also offer new features, including reservations you can make at restaurants through the app via OpenTable, and both time and… Read More

You’d think that competing directly with Apple for its own customers would be a losing game, but iCracked’s iOS repair service continues to grow as Apple approaches 1 billion mobile devices sold — a threshold the company could pass this quarter. Read More

The latest 12-week smartphone sales figures from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, up to September, indicate that Windows Phone’s already small share of the smartphone market has shrunk in Europe — dropping 0.3 percentage points in aggregate across the top five markets in Europe (the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany). Read More

Alpine has a new way to get Apple’s CarPlay in your vehicle of choice: The iLX-007. The new aftermarket entertainment deck supports Apple’s in-car software solution, which translates some of the functions of your iPhone into a format more palatable for use on the road, including Maps, Phone, Message, Music and CarPlay-enabled apps like the recently-updated Rdio. CarPlay is… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Apple released iOS 8.1 today, and with it comes the ability to use Apple Pay on the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. We decided to try it out by going to two nearby businesses that already accept Apple’s NFC-powered mobile payments: Walgreens and McDonald’s. Read More

Accessing your entire photo and video collection from any device can still be a challenge today, especially if you have your media spread out across a variety of local hard drives as well as various cloud services where you have to pay for storage – potentially limiting how much of your collection is hosted online at any given time. Lyve Minds, which launched its first product –… Read More

Update: Apple has pulled the iOS 8.0.1 update from availability, a fix is likely incoming. For now, it appears to only affect iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users. An Apple spokesperson provided us with the following statement:
“We have received reports of an issue with the iOS 8.0.1 update. We are actively investigating these reports and will provide information as quickly as we can. In… Read More

While the free section of Apple’s App Store can sometimes make it seem like we’re living in an Idiocracy, some weird stuff occasionally finds a way to take off on the paid charts as well. The latest such oddity is Goat Simulator, a game that gives you a small town to wreak havoc in as the titular farm animal. Read More

Calling all photographers; dog trainers and dog walkers; handymen; hair stylists and makeup artists, plumbers and pool boys. Your on-the-go businesses now have access to the same type of management software tools that other, more sedentary, small business owners have been working with for years — thanks to the efforts of PocketSuite founders Yang Fordjindam and and Sam Madden. Read More

Storehouse, the 2014 Apple Design Award winning long-form photo-sharing service from former Apple designer Mark Kawano, has launched its app for the iPhone. This comes almost four months after the startup raised $7 million in A-series funding from SherpaVentures and seed investors True Ventures, Lerer Ventures and Designer Fund in order to expand their reach beyond the iPad. Read More

Photo-sharing service EyeEm has released an update to its iOS app that brings some niceties to the camera and camera roll interfaces. The changes make it easier to see which photos are worth uploading and to get them up with fewer taps and swipes. Read More

Apple’s iOS 8 is arriving tomorrow, and while it isn’t as overtly dramatic a change as iOS 7 was last year, it’s still a big update with lots of new features and tweaks. Using it on the new iPhone 6 hardware revealed lots to love in the new mobile OS from Apple, some easing of restrictions that could lead to big advantages for third-party apps, and a lot of potential to… Read More

Microsoft has built a universal hardware keyboard for the three operating systems that have large global market share: iOS, Android, and Windows. The new piece of metal, called the ‘Universal Mobile Keyboard,’ will be available in October.
The device marks the continuance of the company’s cross-platform efforts, but in something of a new way: The keyboard is hardware, made… Read More

Apple has revealed its mobile payments play, and it features NFC and Touch ID, as many expected. The system works as fast as they joked it did on stage – which is why in our demo we ran through a number of different payment scenarios. Read More

Apple’s wearable strategy is out there, and the way they’re looking to distance themselves from the crowd is by introducing a smooth, highly usable interface with unique control mechanisms, and creating a device that embraces apps and features beyond notifications, but in a way that makes sense for a small-screened device. The Apple Watch also cozies up to mobile payments, with NFC… Read More